Vimcasts publishes free screencasts about Vim, the text editor. Vim has been around in one form or another for over 20 years. The learning curve is famously difficult, but those who manage to climb it insist that nothing can match Vim's modal editing model for speed and efficiency.

The patterns of use that make a Vim master productive are not easily discovered. Trial and error will get you so far, but the best way to learn is to watch an experienced Vim user at work. By providing short videos with digestible advice, Vimcasts gives you something you can take away and use immediately to improve your productivity. Vimcasts aims to be the expert Vim colleague you never had.

howtoforge has been a very good site for all kinds of stuff. Definitely a place I reference for newbies cause they break projects into reasonable steps.

I pretty much use Vim because it is included in so many distros. My usage is limited to basic modification of scripts, and one should not be too intimidated by learning everything before using Vim. Basic Insert, Replace, use of # strategically, and how to write/quit goes a long way to getting some effective jobs done.

I have no problem at all using Vim or the graphical interface in Gvim.

I learned Vi and Ed way back in 1982 when I studied UNIX and C programming at a Bell Western Electric training facility in rural New Jersey.

At that time, having been intimately familiar with IBM 3270, 3278 and 3279 terminal displays and keyboards with function keys, I was not yet comfortable with insert and edit modes and I gravitated towards ASCII terminals that tended to have function keys like the mainframe systems.

But once I appreciated the capabilities I was in much better shape.

I also remember in the same approximate timeframe getting my first indoctrination to an implementation of Emacs on a Honeywell mainframe running The MULTICS operating system -- very powerful for its time, but initially tough to grasp.

By the time I started with Linux a few years later both VI and Emacs were second nature to me, even more so when a GUI method was available.

Thinking back to that time however reminds me to be patient with newcomers, especially those who don't have a tech background. I had every possible source of information available to me, which greatly accelerated the rate of learning, so if any of this is daunting, fear not. Seek out learning materials - so much is available these days for every level of learning.

These references, a few of which may come and go, provide a good place to work on the skills needed to make effective use of these editing options.

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Vim_Tips_Wiki is another place where you can get information about Vim and you can also visit vim.org for direct information on the project from the development team who wrote it, primarily Bram himself.

A kind reminder to anyone struggling with the use of what appears to be"complicated" text editors:

Anything new can be a struggle. One advantage that is available to nearly all of us is that there is considerable documentation available on the Internet about anything we want to learn and there are still plenty of books, literature and magazines available for those who need something in front of them.

The first time I had to use Vi and the first time I had to use Emacs I needed a few tips in front of me too and it took a while to truly master the tools and yet when I think back over the years, when I dove in, it was not long and I was able to develop and code using editors I'd never used before.

The eighties were that time for me. For a couple of years I was using mainframe systems and their tools, then within three years I was using mainframe, PC, and UNIX systems, sometimes during the same day.

By 1985, I had mainframe, two completely different OS, UNIX, then VAX/VMS added to the mix. By then I figured out how to seamlessly move between them and I wrote my own keypad tools to introduce similar keystrokes to most of them.

Today, whenever I run across something different I simply look for a few minutes for notes on getting started and I am productive within the first day and optimal for whatever I'm doing in the first week. It's a matter of finding the right combination of tools, information, then integrating them into my daily activities.

For me, my 'ed' days go back to 1982. By the mid nineties, I was primarily jumping between Vim and GNU Emacs on Linux systems, and I used GNU Emacs on UNIX systems and TPU/EDT on VMS proprietary systems. Back then I wrote a lot of macros that made it easy to make Emacs look like EDT or WPS and I had similar macros in TPU.

But yeah, I remember those days well. Using Esc was very important. :-)

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